November 2002 Google Update

Official

Senior Member

Senior Member from US

joined:May 5, 2002
posts:4110
votes: 109

"a little knowledge is a dangerous thing."

Let me tell ya...

No, no, no...! Don't det rid of all our link! I thought you were experienced is search engine techniques. Don't you know anything! Link popularity is the most important thing to getting ranked high in search engines.

You know... I told my boss that you were probably useless, (seriously, he said just that) and he should just give me a raise and I'll take him to #1.

Preferred Member

joined:Aug 9, 2002
posts:422
votes: 0

Hey, first off..Happy Turkey Day everyone!I think this update looks so so ... it could be better but its not terrible. Thank you Google! I think my PR may of been flipped back if the directory is showing the new PR. Its hard to tell but may of risen to PR5 after sinking to a PR3 last month. Still backlinks look like their missing though, all of them? Well still got some decent ranks of 1-15 and then some worse :(

Just to comment on the deal with the hosting.. I pay.. ohh when I add it up at the end of the month about 5-6 times what I used to pay with hostway.com who was supposed to be pretty good. Once I saw them going down and messing me up.. I had to jump ship. If you are serious about your site, how could you not invest in the best of the best for hosting? Like GG said I think, this is the foundation of all! If your going to build on a crappy foundation, then why bother? Or if you do bother then dont complain and dont expect much to come of it for the many reasons including they could be down alot, penalized for porn and such on their ips ..... cmon, use your heads. Would you rent a store in an 100 year old bldg in the projects that is crumbling down or would you go for your everyday place.. ok.. not a good comparison.. but you get the jest.. good luck to all this month! Heres to a profitable, healthy and happy Season! Cheers!

Preferred Member

joined:Jan 2, 2002
posts:374
votes: 0

For those of you who keep posting variations of: "Is it over yet? Am I ok if www3 is good and www2 is different? When will it be in www?"

The Google Dance takes several days. During that time, what you see on www2 or www3 may make brief apperances on www on certain servers (i.e. depending on where you connect from, you may or may not see the same thing).

Junior Member

Like I said to radiosky in a sticky, I regret using the words 'ONLY producing good content' in my original post, as this is clearly not how you achieved your rankings alone. Sorry about that.

I think to summarise how I feel about the whole thing: Basically, I'm not on some crusade to prove that SEO is a complex mystical area that only SEOs know about, or that it's rocket science. In fact, it's quite easy, most of it is just common sense.

But not involving complex programming skills shouldn't devalue SEO as a legitimate business concern. The way I sell SEO is like this. "It isn't hard - I'll even show you how to do it - but wouldn't you rather pay me for all the time and effort that's involved rather than do it youself?"

Again, the intention of my original post was to ask for a re-think of the style of Google's SEO page, as it is written in a very negative fashion.

Junior Member

joined:Oct 24, 2002
posts:147
votes: 0

Funny how this Google Dance works...I know the dance isn't done yet, and things will settle down, but it's still funny. I figured I might as well post this for other newer webmasters who might be a bit confused with their logs.

I am getting a bunch of referrers in my logs from Google and Yahoo, but every time I go to the actual query (copy paste from logs), I'm never there....lol...This is beginning to make me a feel a bit coo-coo. I sure hope things settle down soon so I can actually see my positions on the reg. Google and check out my new PR, since I haven't had one yet! :)

Newbies...You are not going crazy. You are getting hits from Google and Yahoo, but only sporatically, so when "you" actually look, your site isn't listed. I think this is because things haven't settled down yet, but soon they will.

Junior Member

Junior Member

joined:Oct 16, 2002
posts:55
votes: 0

I think the reason Google does these updates on holidays is simply because the internet is less busy and workers are off and the stock market is closed, this way the googlebot does not burden anyone's bandwidth and the googlebot has more bandwidth to quickly do its job.

Senior Member

joined:Jan 8, 2002
posts:993
votes: 0

I'm not sure if this is speculation or fact. It seems to me that the update has migrated to www much faster this time around. At least the SERPs I'm seeing have reflected the update in www for about the last 12 hours.

Senior Member

joined:Feb 17, 2002
posts:3318
votes: 0

Brett,

The 12 months is what I love about your recommendations. I am so tired of people expecting to get instant results with Google.

My recomendation is Don't quit your day job! Key words and developing good site structure may not take long but developing excellent content and gathering quality related links to your site takes months of work.

Junior Member

Senior Member

joined:Jan 25, 2002
posts:2605
votes: 0

I am beginning to feel like a yo-yo! LOL, My main site is up two positions, then down two positions. Next time I look it is up two positions again.... PR still holding steady with it's 7/10...Goooo Google!

New User

joined:Sept 24, 2002
posts:33
votes: 0

Guys can anyone tell me what will happen once the PR is calculated? ie.. Will our sites that have increased in PR move up in the serps once the PR is factored in, or is what we see in www2, and www3 what we can expect once it migrates over to www?

Preferred Member

joined:Jan 2, 2002
posts:374
votes: 0

mediaman, PR tends to be factored in just before the results migrate to www. Often a site will show a serp of, lets say 4, consistently on www2 and www3 throughout the dance then, when ALL results are migrated drop or rise slightly depending on PR. This phenomenon is noted by someone each update.

Senior Member

joined:Oct 8, 2001
posts:2882
votes: 0

NeedScripts: I get sleep when I can, but I'm away from the googleplex right now with relatives for Thanksgiving. As long as it's hard to get work done, I thought I'd drop by here to answer questions. Not that I haven't been eating my share of turkey, too. :)

The things that I liked about radiosky and europeforvisitor's (and Brett's) posts is that they stress getting back to basics: adding good content and making a good site architecture with search-engine friendly pages that are easy to crawl. The philosophy of "don't chase after shortcuts, but pay attention to improving the site a little bit every day for users" resonates with me very strongly. To me, that's is the best type of SEO, whether you decide to call it that or not. ;) Things like paying attention to what users type, and putting those words on your pages in a natural way. Basic keyword research to find out what people in your field type when they're looking for you. I'm a big believer in the "12 month" plan. :)

Okay, off to see if I can find a good post-Thanksgiving deal on a hard drive. Most people who work at Google seem to love having lots of hard drives. Mmmm, vast quantities of storage..

Senior Member

joined:May 12, 2002
posts:4479
votes: 0

>Things like paying attention to what users type, and putting those words on your pages in a natural way.

The problem is that writing for search engine algos and best use of English are incompatible. SEs like repetition. Good style usually means avoiding repetition, and phrasing things to avoid it. Thus the trick is to both write in a way the SE algos like, while not making it seem *too* unnatural to a human reader. This fact is the main argument for directories. Human editors, if they do a good job, can find the good pages that the bots won't.

Senior Member

joined:Oct 27, 2001
posts:10210
votes: 0

The problem is that writing for search engine algos and best use of English are incompatible. SEs like repetition.

So? If you were writing a page about Paris or widgets, wouldn't you repeat the term "Paris" or "widgets" fairly often on the page? You wouldn't need to use the term three times in a sentence or paragraph. In the normal course of events, you'd almost certainly use it enough to catch Google's attention--especially if the page title and headline included "Paris" or "widgets."

Good style usually means avoiding repetition, and phrasing things to avoid it.

That's a common misconception, and it leads to amateurish attempts at variety such as: